Search

thank you all

Having criticized Entertainment Weekly a couple of times for ignoring classical music, I'm happy to note that the magazine reviews Anna Netrebko's "Violetta" disc (arias and duets from Traviata) in the current issue, plausibly recommending that readers skip Il Divo in favor of the real thing. A grade of B+ seems about right.

I can't stop listening to Arnie Schoenberg and His Second Viennese School. It's Lulu's death-shriek that gets me every time. Which diva is responsible for this thrilling rendition? It's not Teresa Stratas on the Boulez recording. Evelyn Lear on the old Karl Böhm set? ... Tom Hartley writes: "Maybe it's Charo."... David McIntire, a Kansas City composer, thinks it might be Helga Pilarczyk, on Antal Dorati's old recording of the Lulu-Suite on Mercury, although he doesn't have the recording handy to check. Anyone?

Below is a late-night-style infomercial for an imaginary compilation of Twelve-Tone Greatest Hits. Ljova and Felsenfeld sent it simultaneously; it's been racing around the Internet, although references to Reggie Jackson and Idi Amin suggest that it's a couple of decades old. Yes, it's cruel, and most of the examples aren't actually twelve-tone music, but you vill laugh anyway. If anyone wants to take credit for the prank, or wants me to desist in publishing it, I will oblige.

Update: An informed reader guesses that this is the work of long-time Cleveland radio host Robert Conrad, president of WCLV and host of that station's Weekend Radio show.

Further update: Mr. Conrad writes, kindly granting me permission to keep the file online. The spot was concocted as an April Fool's joke in 1977. Kenneth Jean, then assistant conductor for the Cleveland Orchestra, wrote the script; Conrad announced it in the style of the K-Tel ads that were everywhere at the time; and Matthias Bamert, then resident conductor in Cleveland, participated in the production. The notion of an "International Matthias Bamert Society" was a long-running in-house gag at WCLV that also produced such fictitious masterpieces as Construction for Erector Set, Symphonies of Kazoos, and the song "Get Off the Locomotive, Mother, Even If You Are On a Toot." Until now Bamert was known to me not as a Hoffnung-style comedian but as the conductor of several finerecordings of the music of Frank Martin. He now leads the Malaysian Philarmonic and the West Australian Symphony. I hope they get his sense of humor. A couple of discographic notes: the superb Lulu death-shriek is delivered by Evelyn Lear, while the monstrously slow rendition of the 11/4 bar in Stravinsky's Rite comes courtesy of the dulcet baton of Lorin Maazel — an in-joke for Cleveland listeners.

I strongly second Steve Smith's impassioned report on the second and last performance of Osvaldo Golijov's St. Mark Passion at Rose Theater. Having already reviewed the major works on display at Lincoln Center's Golijov festival — the Passion, Ainadamar, and Ayre — I don't have much to add this time round, although my appreciation of the composer's gifts has only deepened. What impressed me this time about the Passion was the masterliness of the construction, the way Golijov marshals a potential chaos of disparate material into a steadily ascending arc of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual power. Robert Spano, the almost scarily possessed conductor, deserves much credit for bringing to the surface the deeper narrative logic of the work: at several significant points, big choral chords are sustained until they become structural beams, and the major-triad Amen at the end sounds as a majestic Q.E.D.

Alarm Will Sound's concert last week, on the Night of Ten New-Music Concerts, has
inspired much comment, notably from Justin Davidson, Jerry Bowles, Darcy James Argue, and Maury D'annato. I attended only the first half; then, succumbing again to the bad urge to see everything (see this week's New Yorker column),
I tried to go downtown to see David Schiff's piece,
an expedition that ended in abject failure. What I saw of Alarm Will Sound confirms
that this ensemble not only possesses extreme virtuosity (that we knew)
but that it has developed powerful ideas about how to renovate the
concert experience. The show had a practiced, focused energy. The stage
movement in the Zappa piece was both logical and liberating. And it
was, how you call it, funny; Justin highlighted the Wolfgang Rihm quotation that appeared onscreen just before
his piece began ("I am very excited to write for your crazy ensemble," in
gothic type). Rihm's new piece Will Sound
is a rich little labyrinth of zig-zagging motivic fragments that gives way to a surprisingly rich, lucid, wistful
conclusion — E-flat-ish triadic harmonies materializing from nowhere. The one thing I didn't like was the periodic display of explanatory texts while the musicians were playing. For me, this had a distracting and confining effect. That said,
Alarm Will Sound are incontestably a sensational force.

Over a busy long weekend, I saw Sofia Gubaidulina's astonishing and disturbing new piece Feast During a Plague in Philadelphia, Albert Herring at Gotham Chamber Opera, Hercules at BAM, and the Voigt-powered revival of Forza at the Met. I'll write up reports as time allows. A quick addendum to this week's column: Luciano Berio's completion of Turandot can be heard on a fascinating Riccardo Chailly CD entitled Puccini Discoveries. Notwithstanding Birgit Nilsson's magnificent traversal of the title role, the all-around strongest recording of the complete opera is Zubin Mehta's, with Sutherland, Pavarotti, Caballé, and, yes, Peter Pears. Jens Laurson at ionarts has a detailed review of Valery Gergiev's Maryinsky Turandot.

Drop whatever you are doing, go to the WFMU blog, and listen to three competing versions of Khachaturian's "Sabre Dance" by the Marimba Ponies, Takeshi Terauchi and The Bunnys, and the Texas Chainsaw Orchestra. (Thanks to Mme G_ for the tip.) Check out also the Ljova version.

In a post on Peter Gelb's plans for future seasons at the Met, I stated that Osvaldo Golijov, whom Gelb has commissioned to write an opera, "had already talked to Joe Volpe about a commission." It turns out that although Volpe did once suggest an idea for an opera to Golijov their brief conversation hardly amounted to official talks about a commission.

A fact worth noting about the gracious city of Turin: it is where Nietzsche wrote The Case of Wagner, The Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo, and where he subsequently lost his mind. His last written utterance was a brief letter ending, "I just had all the anti-Semites shot."

St. Botolph's Town brings news that Opera Unlimited will be presenting the American premiere of Peter Eötvös's opera Angels in America in June. For more about this new-ish Boston-based organization, which is a joint venture by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Opera Boston, see David Weininger's article in the Boston Phoenix. Tom Meglioranza, who gave a superb recital of modern American songs at Symphony Space last week, will star as Prior Walter. Farther north, CBC television is presenting several new operas on its Opening Night
series. One of them is Alexina
Louie's Burnt Toast, a cycle of comic operas done in TV-drama style.
I don't know Louie's music, but she has a distinguished resumé. There are various amusing extras at the Burnt Toast site, including a
feature called Operagrams, which, starting Feb. 27, will apparently
enable you to send personalized phone messages via a professional opera
singer. Preview messages are cast in such familiar aria forms as "Drunken Dial" and "Booty Call."

Concert
life in New York has never been more vigorous than it is right now. Or
so it seemed during a sustained delirium of musical events in late
January and early February. The Berlin Philharmonic, under Simon
Rattle, brought its dark-gold sound to Carnegie Hall, in four programs
touching on four centuries; Mozart was celebrated on the
two-hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Lincoln Center
brought in John Eliot Gardiner to conduct Mozart Masses and symphonies,
but it gave more attention to a not-at-all-dead composer, the
impossibly vibrant Osvaldo Golijov, whose flamenco opera “Ainadamar”
and pan-Iberian song cycle “Ayre” played to sold-out halls. The
Juilliard School, in its annual Focus! Festival, presented six evenings
of works written in 2005, including Donald Martino’s Fifth String
Quartet, a valedictory tour de force in high-modern style (the composer
died in December), and Mason Bates’s “Digital Loom,” for organ and
electronics, which transformed the hall into something between a
decaying cathedral and an East Berlin club. At one point, determined
not to be defeated by the surfeit, I made an early exit from a
fabulously murderous twentieth-century program by James Levine and the
Met Orchestra—Bartók’s “Miraculous Mandarin,” Schoenberg’s “Erwartung,”
Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”—to catch a program of Renaissance
polyphony by the Hilliard Ensemble, in the Music Before 1800 series, at
Corpus Christi Church. I don’t recommend going from blood-spattered
Austrian atonality to unyielding Franco-Flemish counterpoint by way of
a hellbent cab ride.

All this was meticulously planned by concert programmers, whose job
is to disappear behind the charisma of performers, but who deserve to
be celebrated on occasion. Two people in particular are playing crucial
roles in New York music: Jane Moss, who is the vice-president for
programming at Lincoln Center, and Ara Guzelimian, who is the artistic
adviser of Carnegie. Each has a distinctive approach, but their tastes
overlap enough to suggest a consensus on what intelligent programming
should look like in the early twenty-first century. Both Moss and
Guzelimian routinely celebrate living composers. They favor festivals
and thematic series—or, in Carnegie’s parlance, “Perspectives”—so that
a creative musician like Valery Gergiev or Ian Bostridge can offer a
world view rather than a bunch of pieces. And they have embraced
non-classical personalities: Carnegie has hosted Caetano Veloso and
Youssou N’Dour, while Lincoln Center recently featured the remarkable
indie-pop singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, whose stark religious song
“Seven Swans” was strangely similar in psychic impact to the Nicolas
Gombert Mass that Hilliard sang at Corpus Christi. The idea is not to
dilute classical music with crossover novelties but to move it back
into the thick of modern life. The old art will no longer hold itself
aloof; instead, it will play a godfather role in the wider culture,
able to assimilate anything new because it has assimilated everything
in the past.

In the middle of this midwinter musical carnival,
the Collegiate Chorale, a venerable New York institution now under the
direction of Robert Bass, presented an all-Puccini program at Carnegie
Hall. It wasn’t an official Carnegie event; the chorus rented the hall,
hiring the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to provide accompaniments and the
soprano Aprile Millo to supply diva ferocity. At first glance, the
concept of a Puccini evening may seem less than fresh, given that the
composer hardly lacks exposure in this town; “La Bohème” is, after all,
the reigning box-office champion at the Metropolitan Opera, having
received 1,178 performances since its local début, in 1900. (“We cannot
believe that there is permanent success for an opera constructed as
this one is,” the Times opined.) But the Collegiate Chorale
accomplished something with Puccini that no one this season has so far
managed to do with Mozart: it succeeded in putting an ultra-familiar
composer in a novel light.

Thoughtful programming reveals something about musical works simply
by juxtaposing them. The Collegiate Chorale put together Puccini’s
first and last operatic thoughts: “Le Villi,” a brief gothic melodrama
about a faithless lover haunted by his dead beloved, which Puccini
wrote in 1883, at the age of twenty-four; and Act III of “Turandot,”
the epic tale of an icy Chinese princess, which he was still working on
at the time of his death, in 1924. “Le Villi” is hobbled by a rickety
dénouement, but the first act is a wonder. It is pure Puccini, lush on
the surface and economical in construction. Italianate lyricism,
Wagnerian harmony, and French atmosphere merge as one. The
orchestration is at once transparent and enveloping. Vocal lines evolve
from a conversational monotone into electrifying lyric arcs. Franco
Farina sang the male lead, while Millo was the maiden turned ghost,
looking properly spooky in a black cape and Bono-style glasses;
together they brought out the systematic ratcheting up of emotion and
tension that defines Puccini’s strongest ensemble writing. The feeling
is of a creative voice materializing out of nowhere, as if by divine
command—which, indeed, is how the usually levelheaded Puccini said that
he was summoned to write opera.

“Turandot” shows the composer facing his greatest
challenge—dramatizing a heroine who, in contrast to the magnificently
earthy characters of “La Bohème” and “Tosca,” is fundamentally inhuman.
To convey Turandot’s awesome coldness, Puccini uses what he has learned
from the modernisms of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. He does not abandon
his lyric gift, as billions who have hummed along to “Nessun dorma” can
attest. The task of reconciling these extremes caused Puccini
uncharacteristic agony. He died before he could write the finale, in
which Turandot’s heart finally melts, and was unsure how to illustrate
her last-minute transformation in musical terms. There is nothing in
opera quite as heartbreaking as the preceding scene, which describes
the death of the slave girl Liù, for the composer of heartbreak is
dying, too; after a heavy-footed procession that echoes the “Spring
Rounds” section of the “Rite of Spring,” ethereal clouds of choral
sound that glance ahead to Messiaen (the Collegiate Chorale had been
waiting for this moment, and made the most of it), and a high piccolo
note shining through a fogbank of E-flat-minor strings, the Voice is
gone.

The quandary of the ending, for which Puccini left a pile of
sketches, one of them containing the famous remark “Then ‘Tristan,’ ”
has bedevilled opera houses ever since Toscanini conducted the
première, in 1926. Puccini’s colleague Franco Alfano fashioned a
conclusion that hurried past the central dramatic challenge into an
orgy of crude triumphalism. The Collegiate Chorale elected to use a far
subtler completion that was prepared, in 2001, by the late Luciano
Berio, whose high-tech, avant-garde façade always concealed a nostalgia
for Romanticism. Berio’s effort is far more satisyfing than Alfano’s,
not only because it is beautifully crafted but because it honors the
fact of Puccini’s death; the new material begins with a shivery
sequence of polytonal chords, suggesting a spirit gliding away, while
also recalling the harsh sonorities with which the opera began. This
version ought to replace Alfano’s at the Met and elsewhere. Still,
there is no mistaking the loss of power that happens when Berio takes
Puccini’s place.

There are amazingly few books about this most beloved of opera
composers. The newest is William Berger’s “Puccini Without Excuses”
(Vintage), which provides an easygoing introduction to the operas and
also feistily defends them against the perennial sneers of
intellectuals. Berger points out that Puccini, despite his popularity,
creates discomfort in this hyper-stylized, ironic age, because he deals
in direct emotion, avoids ideology and moralism, and often favors
characters “of no major consequence,” except insofar as they mirror the
audience. Puccini confounds opera directors who have no interest in
ordinary people; he almost affronts the cool professionalism of the
average young opera singer. Millo is valuable because she has no fear
of raw emotion; she is not afraid to try the potentially ridiculous
gesture that ends up making one’s hair stand on end. Singing Turandot
with the Collegiate Chorale, she communicated everything with a
tentative, wondering enunciation of the word “amore.”

I Feel Love offers the following disturbingly plausible prospectus for "the tackiest production of the Ring
ever": "The whole
thing is set in an American high school. Gods vs Nibelungs = Jocks vs
Nerds. Wotan is the basketball coach; Valhalla is the new school gym
he's had built by doing dodgy deals with the Mafia (Fasolt and Fafner).
The Valkyries are cheerleaders. Brünnhilde is the Natalie Wood/Molly
Ringwald character who transgresses all social boundaries. Siegfried is
the James Dean/Christian Slater figure who brings about the dialectical
collapse of the whole rotten high-school caste system, and the burning
of the school gym at the end ushers in a new social order based on
Tolerance, Good Citizenship and Academic Merit! Tell me it wouldn't
work."

The MP3 blog Moistworks is hosting "writers' week," with excellent sound-object choices and commentary by the likes of Sam Lipsyte, Jonathan Lethem, and Geoff Dyer, whomever they are like. Given my notational propensities, I especially enjoyed David Knowles's take on Nino Rota.

If,
as the song says, it's hard out here for a pimp, it's especially hard
for the pimp who enjoys new-music concerts, of which there is the usual excess in New York this week. Thursday brings seven ten of
them. 1) Alarm Will Sound jangles Zankel with a ferociously complex new Wolfgang Rihm score (Will Sound), Frank Zappa's Dog Breath Variations, John Cage's 0'00", Bernard Woma's Gyil Mambo, Derek Bermel's Three Rivers, part of John Cale's Kiss arranged for ensemble, and part of John Adams's electronic Hoodoo Zephyr also arranged for humans. 2) At Angel Orensanz, the brand-new Metropolis Ensemble presents a very enticing program of Copland's Quiet City, Britten's sublime Serenade (with tenor Daniel Neer), and David Schiff's jazz-inflected Singing in the Dark, with saxophone solos by Marty Ehrlich. (See a Classical Domain interview for more info.) 3) At Symphony Space, janus, a flute-harp-viola trio, plays a program of Debussy, Takemitsu, Dmitri Tymoczko, Caleb Burhans, Saariaho, Cenk Ergün, and Justinian Tamasuza. 4) At Tonic, Ensemble Dissonanzen from Italy offers various solo pieces by the great Giacinto Scelsi together with Marc Ribot's Scelsi Morning. 5) At Greenwich House Arts, electronic composer Carl Stone presents his new laptop landscape ATTARI. 6) On the jazz-classical divide, saxophonist Michael Attias and his trio Renku perform semi-notated, semi-improvised music at Issue Project Room in Gowanus, Brooklyn. 7) The brass section of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra will play Raphael Mostel's haunting and hopeful Night and Dawn
at a benefit for the American Friends of the RCO at Landmark on the
Park, Central Park West at 76th St. Tickets are $90, but, well, dessert is included. 8) The SEM Ensemble reads recent scores and plays Morton Feldman's Why Patterns at their Willow Place Auditorium. 9) Ensemble Sospeso performs Richard Einhorn's score Voices of Light in conjunction with a showing of Carl Dreyer's silent film The Passion of Joan of Arc at the Winter Garden at the World Financial Center (also Friday night). 10) The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center plays works by Anthony Gatto, Keith Fitch, and David Rakowski.

Also this week, Simon Rattle conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra in the first performances of Feast During a Plague, a big new piece by Sofia Gubaidulina; in the same town, Richard Danielpour's Margaret Garner has its last performances at Opera Company of Philadelphia. On Saturday and Sunday in NYC, the wizardly pianist Margaret Leng Tan pursues a chess theme at Anthology Film Archives, presenting a John Cage world premiere — his Chess Pieces of 1944 — together with Vittorio Rieti's Chess Serenade and Michael Nyman's brand-new Pawn to King Four. There will also be surrealist films by Duchamp and Clair with live accompaniment. (Mode Records is
hosting the concert; note their upcoming Xenakis evenings.) Counter)induction plays an all-Italian program at Tenri Cultural Institute on Friday night (more Scelsi). All weekend, John Adams takes a break from writing his new fairy-tale
opera A Flowering Tree to host another In Your Ears festival at Carnegie; this year's edition includes a performance by Rinde Eckert, a jazz night with Dave Douglas, and an new-music afternoon
with Nicolas Hodges, the St. Lawrence Quartet's Geoff Nuttall, and
Derek Bermel. And, not to neglect the old music, BAM presents William
Christie and Les Arts
Florissants in Luc Bondy's production of Handel's Hercules,
with the increasingly potent Joyce DiDonato as the doomed Dejanira.
Warner has put out an excellent DVD of the production. For more, read Steve Smith.

Eric Weisbard, who is planning the next Pop Conference at EMP in Seattle, correctly guessed that I would want to know about Of Montreal's
song "Art Snob Solutions," whose lyrics go in part: "What's up,
directors? Grab your knives / It's time to take all of the lives / Of the people who cannot see the somnolent genius of Tarkovsky....
Throw them all into a well / If they cannot tell / An Arvo Pärt feast
of repetition from a Schoenberg twelve-tone composition." Of Montreal is actually from Athens, GA, and reminds me of the great old Television Personalities.

It turns out that Olympic music has an experimental wing. Sources on multiple continents inform me that Ombretta Agró Andruff is curating sound-art installations both in Torino and in the mountains above, and that a major new boombox work by New York's own Phil Kline will be the centerpiece. See Echoes from the Mountains for more info. Ah, Europe!

Peter Gelb talks to Dan Wakin of the New York Times about forthcoming Met seasons. The prospectus is much as advance rumor led one to expect: a chic list of directors for repertory pieces (Patrice Chéreau, George C. Wolfe, Robert Lepage doing the Ring), a starry assortment of guest conductors (Riccardo Muti, Daniel Barenboim, Esa-Pekka Salonen), various collaborative ventures and technological tie-ins. I mentioned the Anthony Minghella Butterfly in my column in December. A lot of this sounds good. After years of committee-ish, catch-up choices at the Met, it's a relief to have an identifiable sensibility at work. I'm especially encouraged by the news that Gelb is lowering prices on a big bloc of tickets, even as he raises prices on the choicest seats. Less encouraging are his ideas about new music. An Osvaldo Golijov opera is a splendid notion, but not exactly daring; the composer had already talked to Joe Volpe about a commission. So what else? I'm not sure what to make of plans for a music-theater workshop with the likes of Michael John LaChiusa, Adam Guettel, Wynton Marsalis, and Michael Torke. It's intriguing, but I have a hard time visualizing how music theater would play in such a huge house, and there's a long list of composers I'd have gone to first (though the choice of Rufus Wainwright may turn out to be inspired). The Met should be doing late twentieth-century classics like Messiaen's St. Francis, Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, Glass's Einstein on the Beach. It should have new grand operas by John Adams, Kaija Saariaho, Thomas Adès. It should have an avant-garde wing, in talks with Robert Ashley or Helmut Oehring or Björk or whom have you. Of course, I'm not the one asking for the checks. It's not yet time to pass judgment; check back in 2011. By the way, the Times piece appeared on page 1, which was cool to see.

Correction to the above: It turns out that although Volpe did once suggest an idea for an opera
to Golijov the conversation hardly amounted to official talks about a
commission.

Some interesting musical programming is tied into the Torino Winter Games, no trace of which is likely to make it onto the television broadcast. Daniel Harding leads the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in programs of Beethoven and Sibelius (wintriest of composers). Composer Carlo Galante has created a new version of The Tempest, inspired by Purcell. Puccini's Manon Lescaut and La Bohème will be performed in Torino's Teatro Regio, where both works had their premieres, in 1893 and 1896. If I understand the site correctly, Manon will be directed by French movie star Jean Reno (Le Femme Nikita), who is to "take his first steps in an opera production, together with a tried and
tested team of French authors who always follow him in his theatrical
and film creations." Don't tell Peter Gelb. (Charles Downey at ionarts, always a step ahead, has more.) The major event is the Feb. 15 premiere of Arvo Pärt's La tela traslata, a work for chorus and orchestra inspired by the Shroud of Turin. I hope some report leaks out about all this. Perhaps a Noise reader is in attendance? A Ferneyhough-obsessed bobsled champion, or Furtwänglerian figure-skater?